By Bob Gibson, TPSS Board of Representatives
One of the questions members and shoppers regularly ask TPSS is why don’t we carry more local fruits and vegetables in the co-op? Why isn’t more of the produce that area farmers sell at the Takoma Park farmer’s market also on sale at TPSS?
On December 18, TPSS hosted a one-hour presentation and discussion that addressed local food sourcing from three perspectives: wholesale food purchasing (industry consultant Mandilyn Beck); the local farmer (Rick Hood of Summer Creek Farms in Thurmont, MD), and the retail co-op view (TPSS general manager Mike Houston). You can find a recording of the meeting on Youtube.
Key takeaways:
- Our national and local food economy largely excludes local producers through dependence on a system that relies on large-scale, long distance distribution of foods purchased from volume producers.
- Maryland has relatively few farms such as Summer Creek that sell fresh produce at wholesale to grocery stores. Most local farms do not produce sufficient volume required for the wholesale business, and instead sell at retail prices direct to the consumer at farmers’ markets.
- TPSS is rare among regional groceries in that it has both policy and practices that prioritize doing business with local food producers, including a retail on-ramp program providing opportunities to start-ups.
- More fresh, local produce might become more widely available in our region with the development of local and regional fresh food aggregators and distribution networks.
Since World War II, Beck explained, the U.S. has enjoyed an abundance of affordable fresh (as well as prepared) food through the growth of corporate group purchasing organizations (GPOs). These GPOs thrive on long distance shipping of foods produced at volume and sold to large buyers – which includes retail outlets like groceries and restaurants, and institutions such as hospitals, universities, public schools and corporate campuses. GPOs make profits on contracted rebates (in effect, kickbacks) from volume producers. This system dominates the supply of fresh food and almost entirely cuts out the local suppliers. Beck is involved in nascent efforts to develop regional distribution networks that can bring more fresh local products into the local food economy.
Hood’s Summer Creek Farm is a 35-acre farm that grows a dozen certified organic vegetable crops, along with producing organic horticultural soils and fertilizers. His fresh produce business relies on 10 to 12 wholesale customers, including TPSS, that offer sufficient demand to support twice-a-week deliveries during the season.
Hood notes that restraints on fresh produce production at wholesale scale in Maryland include the high cost of land and finding the workers required for such labor-intensive farming.
Most Maryland fresh vegetable farms tend to be much smaller than Summer Creek and sell direct to consumers at farmers’ markets. These farms depend on higher level retail sales and “likely are not producing enough product to make it worthwhile to drive to TPSS,” said Hood. In terms of meeting a desire to get more local produce on the shelves of TPSS, Hood says “quite frankly, it just doesn’t exist.”
TPSS currently buys from 198 local vendors, and these products are found in every section of the store, from wellness to dairy to prepared foods to beverages to baked goods and more. TPSS buys local fresh fruits and vegetables in season from Summer Creek and a handful of southeastern Pennsylvania farms such as Mike Tabor’s Licking Creek, Lancaster Farms and Common Market, a Philadelphia-based aggregator of small farms. But fresh produce represents a small portion of the co-op’s local providers. To keep popular fruits and vegetables on the shelf year-round and to access produce not grown locally, TPSS buys organic and sustainably produced goods largely through Four Seasons, a distributor serving the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Houston says that “TPSS offers retail on-ramps [for local vendors] that is increasingly non-existent at corporate grocery stores.” He notes that Whole Foods “once did a tremendous job on local sourcing.” Now, like most corporate chains, it no longer seeks to buy from local producers but focuses on large-scale distribution for the sake of efficiency and profits.
It is increasingly important that we have co-ops and independent stores, says Houston “who provide an on-ramp for producers who are graduating from farmers’ markets and want to try their hand at retail.”
Even so, he says, “it’s not a good thing [for the local food economy] that we are increasingly differentiated in this way.”
Once TPSS has settled on the location for a second store and the strategic planning for a two-store enterprise is underway, the co-op’s board and management will be exploring ways to expand access to locally grown fresh produce.